page_title: Mendicant orders
section_title: Characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: Mendicant orders / Characteristics
caption_attribution_description: English: Published in London. Image of Carmelite Friar
context_page_description: Mendicant orders are, primarily, certain Christian religious orders that have adopted a lifestyle of poverty, traveling, and living in urban areas for purposes of preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor. At their foundation these orders rejected the previously established monastic model. This model prescribed living in one stable, isolated community where members worked at a trade and owned property in common, including land, buildings and other wealth. By contrast, the mendicants avoided owning property at all, did not work at a trade, and embraced a poor, often itinerant lifestyle. They depended for their survival on the goodwill of the people to whom they preached.
  The term "mendicant" is also used with reference to some non-Christian religions to denote holy persons committed to an ascetic lifestyle, which may include members of religious orders and individual holy persons.
context_section_description: The Franciscans and Dominicans put into practice a pastoral strategy suited to the social changes. The emergence of urban centers meant concentrated numbers of the homeless and the sick. This created problems for the parish churches who found themselves unable to address these issues. Since many people were moving from the countryside to the cities, they no longer built their convents in rural districts but rather in urban zones.
  In another innovation, the mendicant orders relinquished their principle of stability, a classical principle of ancient monasticism, opting for a different approach. Unlike the Benedictine monks, the mendicants were not permanently attached to any one particular convent and to its abbot. Because the orders' primary aim was the evangelization of the masses, the church granted them freedom from the jurisdiction of the bishops and they traveled about to convert or reinforce faith. The freedom of mendicancy allowed Franciscans and Dominicans mobility. Since they were not tied to monasteries or territorial parishes, they were free to take the gospel into the streets, to preach, hear confessions and minister to people wherever they were. Friars Minor and Preachers traveled with missionary zeal from one place to another.
  Consequently, they organized themselves differently in comparison with the majority of monastic orders. Instead of the traditional autonomy that every monastery enjoyed, they gave greater importance to the order as such and to the Superior General, as well as to the structure of the order Provinces. Their flexibility enabled them to send out the most suitable friars on specific missions, and the mendicant orders reached North Africa, the Middle East and Northern Europe.
  As students and professors, Friars Minor and Friars Preacher, Franciscans and Dominicans, entered the leading universities of the time, set up study centers, produced texts of great value and were protagonists of scholastic theology in its best period and had an important effect on the development of thought. The great thinkers, St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure, were mendicants.
  In all the great cities of western Europe, friaries were established, and in the universities theological chairs were held by Dominicans and Franciscans. Later in the 13th century they were joined by the mendicant orders of Carmelites, Augustinian Hermits, and Servites.
  They attracted a significant level of patronage, as much from townsfolk as aristocrats. Their focus of operation rapidly centered on towns where population growth historically outstripped the provision of rural parishes. Most medieval towns in Western Europe of any size came to possess houses of one or more of the major orders of friars. Some of their churches came to be built on grand scale with large spaces devoted to preaching, something of a specialty among the mendicant orders.
caption: Published in London. Image of Carmelite Friar.
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